From Wild One (1953) starring Marlon Brando, via Hunter S. Thompsonâs book Hells Angels (Thompson 2012) to crime shows such as Gangland or TV series such as Sons of Anarchy, outlaw motorcycle clubs have become an iconic element of Western popular culture (Austin et al. 2010). They inhabit a space between the real and the imaginary, where life often tries to live up to the fiction . They are a force of the underworld, as much as a force of imagination; they are unafraid to act, to leave a trace behind in the world, and make sure their reputation precedes them. Law enforcement agencies worldwide treat outlaw motorcycle clubs as transnational criminal organizations and an increasing threat to security . And with good reasons: Members of outlaw motorcycle clubs across the world have been charged with murder , extortion, violence , trafficking in humans , drugs, weapons, money laundering, corruption, illegal prostitution , and white-collar crime. Media indulge in spectacular reports on the crimes of the most notorious of themâbe it the Hells Angels MC that sees itself as the âelite of the eliteâ of outlaw biker clubs, or its archenemiesâthe Bandidos MC , Outlaws MC, Mongols MC, Gremium MC , and others. The clubs themselves often claim that they are misrepresented and unjustly criminalized, insisting they are just a bunch of âmen with a hobbyâ joined together by the love of motorcycles and riding , and that few bad apples are bound to appear in any organization (Koetsenruijter and Burger 2018).
Outlaw motorcycle clubs repulse people as much as they attract them. On the route from the rebellious American postwar biker clubs to transnational criminal empires, the outlaws have made not only a great deal of enemies, but also many friends. The number of friends and supporters of the outlaws increased dramatically over the last three decades. The big outlaw motorcycle clubs have today their own organized support clubs, such as the Red & White Warriors and AK81 support crews of the Hells Angels, Black & White Crew for Outlaws, or Mexican Teamwork and X-team for Bandidosâand many others. Thousands of supporters across the globe are keen to affiliate with them, display admiration and commitment , dress in support merchandize , and cheer the bikers both online and offline. The clubs, be it in reality or imagination, fill a certain lack many people experience in their lives today. Lack and absence are considered here as productive forces, constitutive of desire âbe it lack or absence of solidarity , sovereignty , sacred , power , control , equality, justice, purpose, hope , values, security , or order. Outlaw motorcycle clubs have successfully managed to produce an alternative transnational culture that attempts to fill these fundamental lacks , feeding off their proliferation and intensification under neoliberalism . The clubs can be imagined as cultural alternatives or parallel alternative social orders to the unsatisfying consumer culture with its endless manufacturing of new desires and oppressive socio-symbolic competition and aggression (Hall et al. 2012), and to what many see as the weakening state unable to control the economic forces beyond the control of the individual, obsessed instead with curbing of individual freedoms , paternalism , and securitization . This alternative adaptive cultural and social function of the clubs has remained unnoticed and ignored in existing research that favors narrow perspectives on the crimes committed by the clubs. This book, while in no way denying the crimes and harms associated with the outlaw biker milieu, attempts to take a step back and look at these larger cultural and social functions of the clubs, considering them as a response to the fundamental lacks and desires that people experience.
Grounded in a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, ânetnography â (Kozinets 2010), analysis of popular culture and close reading of relevant literature and media , this book seeks to understand what the outlaws have, or are imagined to have, that is so appealing to certain people at this moment in history . What makes people display such love beyond reason as this lifelong supporter of Hells Angels, who when he finally met Sonny Barger (Barger 2001, 2005), the famous father figure and founding member of the Oakland Hells Angels, told me the following:
I have loved him as a father since I was a teenager. 81 is the only true and loyal family . I support everything Sonny and the club stands for. I am proud to have been a loyal supporter most of my life. 1
We will try to understand this vicarious enjoyment and participation in the outlaw biker lifestyle, including its illegal deeds (Duncan 1991). Mostly, outlaw bikers are far from being ânoble banditsâ (Hobsbawm 1969), and yet the supporters put a great deal of effort into perceiving them in a favorable light. What they see in them are precisely those cultural and social qualities and goods that theorists have been far too often quick to dismiss and neglect. The supporters project their desires and longings onto the outlaws and attempt to fill the lacks they struggle with in their lives, be it through both vicarious enjoyment of the outlaw Other, real acts of mutual support or identification . Before we turn to the analysis that spans across this book, let us remind ourselves of some basics about these clubs and sketch the method and limitations of the text that follows.
Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs: From Rebels to Entrepreneurs
There is a number of popular books and academic accounts of the history of the outlaw bikers, and I refer the readers to some of these, as this book is not one of history (Reynolds 2000; Nichols 2007, 2012; McGuire 1986; Hopper and Moore 1983; Hayes 2015, 2016b; Harris 1985; Dulaney 2005; Barker 2011; Bain and Lauchs 2017). Nonetheless, a brief historical note is in order. There is possibly no better account of the beginnings of the subculture than Maz Harrisâ Bikers: Birth of Modern Day Outlaw (Harris 1985). Maz Harris was a member and spokesperson of the Hells Angels in England, who received his PhD in sociology with a thesis on the biker subculture from the University of Warwick in 1986 (Harris 1986). 2 In his book, he sums up the origins as follows:
The outlaw bike culture was born at the end of the Second World War. It grew in the rundown quarters of Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and the many grey urban sprawls dotted along the Pacific Coast. Californiaâs golden dream did not reach far into the ghetto. Life there had progressively worsened during the immediate post-war years. Thousands of rural workers, weary of decades of trying to scratch a living from unproductive land, flocked to the towns in search of a piece of Americaâs massive industrial expansion. The already seething mass of human misery was swollen to unbearable proportions by this influx. They constituted a massive new workforce to be ruthlessly exploited in factories and sweatshops⌠Families were split up and traditional ties of mutual support and dependence severed⌠This first generation of poor-white slum dwellers was quite unlike its much more experienced and culturally better adapted black and Mexican counterparts. It had yet to realize that there was no room for the sober, decent, individualistic human being in the new cut-throat world. The parents were anxious to maintain a sense of decency and clung to the values of their rural forefathers. Not so their offspring who, brought up in the ghetto, quickly learned to adopt the methods of defense and resistance of their black contemporaries⌠They fully realized the hopelessness of the situation they were in and understood only too well the gulf between their parentsâ aspirations and material reality⌠What emerged, as one form of âsolutionâ to the problems faced by these disaffected first-generation white immigrants, was the arrival on t...